Redundant arrays of inexpensive or independent storage devices (RAID) are being employed by the mass storage industry to provide variable capacity storage using pluralities of interconnected disk drives to achieve the desired capacity of mass storage.
With this approach, a disk drive of one design may be fabricated and packaged with another or others to achieve a required data storage capacity. This eliminates the need to fabricate pluralities of individual disk drives of differing storage capacity to meet storage needs, which is expensive.
The individual disk drives of one design are mounted in individual modules which are handled manually. These modules are slidably inserted into and removed from an enclosure in which they are mounted and in which they are electrically interconnected to provide the required data storage capacity for a particular system. Controllers orchestrate the interconnection and control the access of sectors and tracks on selected disk drives for reading or writing data.
Disk drives are high precision electro-mechanical devices having head/disk assemblies in which the heads, in reading and writing modes of operation, fly on the air bearing at the disk surface. The flight height of the head is only a few microns from the surface of a disk. The manual handling of a disk drive of such precision places the disk drive at risk in an abusive shock force environment.